Recently, there’s been a bit of a stink in many states, including Washington about whether or not pharmacists should be allowed to refuse to sell “Plan B”. Plan B is a drug that…

Plan B® is an emergency contraceptive that can still prevent a pregnancy after contraceptive failure or unprotected sex.

Plan B® should be taken within 3 days (72 hours) of unprotected sex and can reduce the risk of pregnancy by 89%. But the sooner you take it the more effective it will be.

Plan B® is not RU-486 (the abortion pill); it will not work if you are already pregnant.

Ask your healthcare professional for a prescription in advance, so that it will be there for you — in time — if you ever need it.

(from the manufacturer’s web site)

On their site, they call it “emergency contraception”. The trouble is that some anti-abortion groups believe that the drug might act by preventing an already-fertilized egg from connecting and implanting into the uterine wall. To them, Plan B is just a chemical form of abortion.

Reading articles on the subject, it doesn’t appear to be 100% conclusive either way. This article from Slate magazine’s William Saletin, a fairly good writer, seems to suggest that the evidence is unclear and that even the drug’s manufacturer says that the drug may work by preventing a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus. But this article says that a study in the “Journal of Contraception” says that the drug only works by preventing ovulation and/or fertilization of the egg in the first place.

The reason this matters is simple- if the drug works by preventing fertilization in the first place, then most of your pro-life groups aren’t going to have a huge issue with it, because it’s not “aborting” what they consider to be a human being.

(To these anti-abortion folks, once an egg is fertilized- even when it’s only one or two or four or eight cells making up an embryo- it’s absolute; you don’t do anything that might lead to the egg/embryo being killed.)

But if the drug works by preventing a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, well, that’s abortion to some, so they won’t support it.

The problem comes when pharmacists refuse to sell or dispense the drug based upon their personal, moral viewpoint on abortion. (For this reason, it’d sure be nice if science could provide us with a hard, clear answer on how the drug works.) Indeed, some pharmacists (but relatively few) won’t even dispense the standard birth control pill, because it might also work by preventing implantation.

(Of course, some pharmacists just don’t sell The Pill because it outrages or offends them that people are having sex for fun instead of only out of a sense of duty to God, the way He wants it.)

When I first started reading about this issue, my liberal/progressive/lefty self got all outraged. Hey, I live in Seattle, I’m well-programmed by now. “How dare those righty fundies limit access to a perfectly legal and accepted drug! They’re licensed by the state and have a duty to provide medical care!”

The thing is that in almost all of the cases of a pharmacist refusing to dispense the drug, they’re also perfectly willing to refer the patient to another local pharmacy that WILL hand it out.

What’s more, I then thought of it this way- most of us, even us pro-choice types, probably wouldn’t force doctors (surgeons and/or OB/GYNs) to perform abortions, right? Because to do so would be fairly heinous and mean and nasty and override their personal right to choose whether doing abortions is something they want to do, and we just don’t do that in America. I’m sure, though, that there are some ardently pro-choice people who believe that such doctors darned well *should* be forced into performing abortions; there’s extremists all over the map on this issue. Most pro-choicers, though, wouldn’t force a doctor into it.

So what’s the difference between allowing a doctor the ability to choose for him or her self about whether or not to do an abortion, and allowing a pharmacist the ability to choose for him or her self whether or not to dispense a drug that might have the same effect (death of or expelling of a fertilized egg)?

I go back and forth on this one. In fact, I’m still undecided. There are 4 times as many more doctors (roughly 800,000 or so) than there are pharmacists (roughly 200,000 or so) in the United States, meaning the people who say that the pharmacists are limiting a resource have a good point.

But at the same time, there’s still 200,000 pharmacists, meaning the odds are you’ll be able to find one, quickly and relatively easily, who will give you the Plan B pills.

What happens if you’re in a small, rural community, though, where there’s only one pharmacy and the owner doesn’t stock Plan B? In many places, thanks to their mega-stores killing all competition, Wal-Mart is all there is; and up until a month ago, Wal-Mart didn’t stock Plan B. (They only just started, and still allow their employees to not dispense if they are a conscientious objector.)

I just don’t know. Pharmacies are taking advantage of limits on free trade; to have a pharmacy, you have to have all kinds of licenses from the federal government and states, you have to have requisite training, and because of the scarcity involved in getting those licenses and training, there’s effectively a monopolistic brake on the number of pharmacists. They have to operate under specific conditions and do certain things (track their drug supply, not allow unlicensed people behind the counter or to do certain things, etc) that make it clear they’re not 100% in control of their business.

At the same time, I have a very hard time with the State forcing people to do something they’re not comfortable with.

An easy counter to this idea is the argument that if people don’t want to have to dispense the drugs, they don’t have to be pharmacists.

Back and forth, back and forth. I just don’t know. Heck, I’m not even sure about Buddhist ideals on abortion; on the one hand, we respect ALL life; on the other hand, we also support people’s right to choose for themselves their own path to happiness.

In any case, it’s an interesting discussion, and despite the fact that it’s got some abortion overtones, for the most part it hasn’t gotten too hysterical a fight.

…and over 11,000 terrorist attacks in 2005 means the world is safer than the 3,129 attacks that happened in 2004.

Huh?

Beats me. More Bush Administration double-talking gobbledegook, if you ask me. Basically, the annual report on terrorism is out, and yet again it shows terrorist attacks on the rise. (In the past, the Administration tried to just not release the report, but that didn’t go over too well.)

What it comes down to is that we’ve had Bush in charge for several years, and things keep getting worse. When will his War On Terror produce some results- like less terrorism?

…to those who commented recently. Those who disagree are always more interesting, even if more frustrating, than those who agree.

Is there any such thing as capital punishment that isn’t cruel and unusual?

That’s what comes to my mind when I read about the latest efforts in the ongoing battle over the death penalty.

Basically, the latest thing is for the lawyers to file a lawsuit that says that lethal injection doesn’t fully numb or render unconscious the prisoner. They use three different drugs in lethal injection; the first is supposed to knock you out, the second stops your muscles from moving (thereby stopping respiration and paralyzing you), and the third stops your heart from beating.

The problem is that the first drug, if you don’t get enough of it in your system, might not fully knock you out- so you can feel intense pain as the second and third drugs flow into you. But because of the effects of the drugs (particularly the second), you might not kick or wiggle or scream- meaning you’re just paralyzed but in monster amounts of pain.

All of this is interesting, but it seems to me to avoid the more important question- can you have capital punishment in any form and still avoid the Constitution’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment?

I’m not a fan of the death penalty. I object to it on several grounds; the most basic one doesn’t even get into whether it’s cruel. The most basic objection is that it doesn’t work. This has been shown numerous times; states that have the death penalty don’t have any lower crime rates (for the crimes it’s intended for) than those that do.

I know all the counter arguments on this, and they’re all stupid. “The problem isn’t the penalty, it’s how it’s administered.” Wrong- if you’re going to administer it fairly, you pretty much have to have it administered the way it is now, with lots of appeals and second (and third, and fourth) chances for people to prove their innocence or something. If you don’t, you wind up killing innocent people; in fact, we probably already have killed innocent people, and that’s (to most) a worse crime against humanity than even the heinous crimes that we’re trying to stop in the first place.

“At least it stops that guy from doing it again.” The problem is that it doesn’t give you or me any better chance to not be exposed to the crime in the first place! And what’s more, that guy could easily be stopped from doing it again by locking him up for life without parole.

Anyway, the bigger question that’s already been asked and answered by many other nations is whether or not capital punishment itself can possibly be anything but cruel.

I mean, let’s face it- it seems a little bit silly to be worrying about whether or not a guy who is undoubtedly about to die is feeling pain, doesn’t it? In a minute or two, he’s going to be dead no matter what- the third drug, administered correctly, WILL stop his heart and he’ll pass out within a few seconds, leading to brain death within a minute or three. Why worry if you’re torturing him with horrible pain in the meanwhile?

The answer is because we want to think we’re not being mean, callous, cruel, inhuman (and inhumane.) We want to believe that we’re just doingn something that’s necessary and unavoidable, but that’s got to be done.

The problem is that it just doesn’t. Lock ‘em up forever. Throw away the key. But don’t play games with it; admit it. The fact is that if I, myself, captured someone and held them prisoner for a length of time, told them that in a week or a month or a year or five years, on this date, I was going to take them out of their holding cell, strap them down, and kill them (however I do it- electric chair, hanging, firing squad, poison gas, lethal injection of drugs)… if I, or you, or any of us, did that on our own, it would be viewed as a horrible, nasty, inhumane and cruel crime and way to treat someone.

But if the State does it, that somehow makes it not-cruel? Give me a break. Capital punishment IS definitely cruel. Even when applied to the scummiest scumbags who have wasted our air, it’s still a gross violation against Life itself, and a horrible thing to do to someone, even those that most of us think probably deserve it.

If someone raped and tortured and murdered my mom, my sister, my girlfriend, I’d probably want to kill them. That doesn’t make it okay, and it doesn’t make it okay if the State does it on my behalf.

In the end, the death penalty is just plain cruel. If you’re okay with that, well, that’s your opinion; but at least be honest and say “yeah, but I don’t have a problem with that.”